Today Bennett Tomlin and Cas Piancey bring on David Canellis, the director of news at Protos Media (https://protos.com) and long time journalist covering cryptocurrency and fintech, to discuss the "decentralized" social media platform BitClout. We'll talk about its odd origin story, why David thinks it's probably destined to fail, and why it reminds us of so many other projects that never made it out of the 2017/2018 cryptocurrency bullrun.

In this episode Bennett and Cas discuss the concepts of regulatory capture and regulatory arbitrage - systemic problems that aren't unique to any particular industry, but have helped dissolve public trust of regulators and enriched some of the worst companies and individuals.

Bennett and Cas try to discuss an intensely complex and controversial topic: what Bitcoin being declared legal tender in El Salvador will mean for the small, Central American country.

In this episode, Bennett and Cas discuss the confusing concept of what a "Tether redemption" would look like: an ever-shifting definition built on a stablecoin with an ever-shifting definition of what 1-1 backed by traditional fiat currency means. Though we haven't seen an actual Tether redemption shown on Twitter, or otherwise, for the world to see, we look forward to someone coming forward with one shortly!

In this episode Bennett and Cas discuss what's being termed "shillfluencers," or influencers, celebrities, and other individuals with wealth and power, who use their "influence" to "shill" their investments. There's plenty of people - including billionaires (Elon) and has-beens (Soulja Boy) - who continue to take advantage of their ability to manipulate markets, to the point where it feels like a societal sickness. But will there be consequences?

Bennett Tomlin and Cas Piancey discuss how Coinbase plans on creating a media company to confirm its own version of the facts and report its own version of the truth. Is journalism entering its final death spiral or are VC bros just losing their minds? Read more here: https://protos.com/coinbase-crypto-exchange-media-content-marketing-journalism/ https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/05/31/a-rant-about-coinbase-media-and-coinbase-fact-checking/

Bennett and Cas dive into what happened at QuadrigaCX - once the largest Canadian Bitcoin exchange. If you'd like to read a more detailed piece you can find "Death Fraud" here: https://medium.com/coinmonks/death-fraud-6920cc93d0a7

Cas and BT discuss Crypto Capital Corp, a defunct, fake, Panamanian money services transmitter that helped service almost every important cryptocurrency exchange, owned and operated by Reginald Fowler, Ivan Manuel Molina Lee, and Oz and Ravid Yosef. 

Today Bennett Tomlin and I go over the recent disclosure by Tether of the make up of its reserves. If you'd like to read more, please visit: "For Every $1 in Tether there are $0.03 in Cash" https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/05/13/for-every-1-of-tether-there-are-0-03-in-cash/ or "Inside the Great Pie Chart giving Tether its dollar value" https://protos.com/tether-pie-chart-usdt-dollar-pegged-crypto-stablecoin-dollar-value/

This episode, unfortunately, is absent Bennett. Quick summary of why Zhao Dong ended up being sentenced to prison time in China. If you'd like to read more: https://protos.com/renrenbit-zhao-dong-bitcoin-billionaire-pleaded-guilty-money-laundering/ https://medium.com/coinmonks/another-usecase-bites-the-dust-e64ba9b95c6 https://medium.com/coinmonks/zhao-dong-still-matters-heres-why-cff29d6089fd https://thecaspiancey.medium.com/zhao-dong-the-final-word-e3417eea12f